ACCESS TO THE highest quality university education for people with talent and ability flows through Newcastle like the Hunter River.

This sense of education as an entitlement has prevailed from the city’s origins and through its industrial journey.

With the university now placed in the top 3 per cent in the world, it is a determining factor for the post-industrial future.

“Equity and excellence are embedded in the University’s DNA,” says Vice-Chancellor Professor Caroline McMillen.

“Those values have characterised the university since its foundation.”

The idea that education should be available to all was imported by the diaspora from the UK, particularly the mining areas of Wales and the north of England. Workers familiar with the concept built the infrastructure around the port. They ensured Newcastle would not to be defi ned solely by its industrial landscape and had aspirations that could only be met by education.

“Throughout the growth in prosperity of the city and the region, there was a clear view that the best education should be available to people in Newcastle and the Hunter, and that should be a university education,” says Professor McMillen.

The populace had aspirations and the city had momentum through industry and innovation. This gelled with the vision of the early leaders of the university. They were engaged when they were appointed, and had very high standards of performance.

The generation of leaders who came during the founding years realised the importance of being in a region thirsty for a university education, and where secondary schooling at the time was not necessarily optimal.

The leadership group saw an absolute need to build pathways to the university and began to construct them.

The first enabling programs were established in 1974 and they showed the region itself and Australia that a secondary school education is not the only pathway to a university education for bright people.

“They were critical,” says Professor McMillen. “I think more than 45,000 students have enrolled in enabling programs. It gives people and families confi dence.”

Newcastle has just over 3 per cent of students with an Indigenous background, which is on parity with the population proportion. It has about 24 per cent of students from a low socio-economic background, and a high proportion, almost 60 per cent of students, who are not traditional school-leavers.

“If students come into this sort of environment having gone through an enabling program, and are unable to handle the level of material put to them in a high-calibre degree program, then you are setting people up for failure,” says Professor McMillen.

“People are looking for academic preparation, but there is a confusion between academic preparation and ability. At Newcastle, we will give you the preparation, and if you have the ability and you come through that, you will fare well. We are not doing you a disservice by taking you into university.

That is really critical. The region and the university had it right from its foundations.”

The expansion to the Central Coast is a case in point.

Newcastle provides the best university for students who may not have had the best secondary school experience.

Students from a whole array of backgrounds are getting a degree from a university in the top 300 in the world based on its quality of education, its quality of research and its innovation.

“For me, the way the university is delivered on the Coast, for the Coast, is hugely important for the region,” says Professor McMillen. “Regions are short-changed by decisions that say any institution will do. That is not the Newcastle value proposition.”

Universities across Australia based in regions with similar demographics to the Hunter also serve their communities.

Generally they are newer and on the way to building that reputation.

“In Newcastle, it’s that walking together of equity and excellence that sets us apart,” says Professor McMillen.

“Being in the top group of universities, the top three for engineering and the top seven or eight for health and medical research. This is unique.

“The much older universities focus on the excellence and may consider the challenge to address inequity is inconsistent with that excellence, whereas the University of Newcastle naturally set out on this path. The leadership was committed to it.”

As communities around the world seek to build their education base, the Newcastle message that equity and excellence are not mutually exclusive and can work, rings loud.

“Considering the Indigenous students we have had – one going to Harvard to do a PhD having come through an enabling program, one going to Oxford, another to Cambridge this year – says that if you put the right academic preparation in place then bright people can take the opportunities as they present,” says Professor McMillen.

“That is clear evidence that the Newcastle model, and the expectation for bright people who are engaging with their education, works. You don’t have to trade equity for excellence.”